Deportation: an increasingly 'foreign' Britain at war with itself

The Government seems to be doing its best to detain and remove as many immigrants as it can. Usman Sheikh, a lawyer specialising in detention cases, asks why.

The UK Government's own most recent figures
show that there are now more people in immigration detention than at any time
since records began. In London, the police are working more closely with the UK
Border Agency to ensure that as many immigrants as possible arrested by the
police are removed from the UK. This is in line with my own experience as an
immigration lawyer. I see increasing numbers of people in detention, many of
them arrested while going about their ordinary day to day lives.

What goes through the mind of the police officer or
the UKBA official as they, on behalf of the British Government, tap the
immigrant on the shoulder to set this whole process in motion? The legal
grounds are simple. In essence, they must have reasonable grounds to suspect
that the immigrant has committed an offence, including any one of the
‘immigration offences’, or is liable to be detained under immigration powers.

However, many people could fall within this category
and a choice therefore has to be made as to how these powers are to be used. Of
course, that choice is made primarily in the realm of politics. The current
situation suggests that the Government has chosen to increase greatly its use
of these powers. The background is well-known: the Government
wishes to cut immigration and the public
sees immigration as a key concern.

Is this concern justified? This is of course a large
question as well as a very old one. But recent statistics help us to think
again about this. Some
have suggested that the recent Census figures show that the concern is
justified. However, this is far from clear. The Census shows that of the usual
residents of England & Wales 75.7 per cent are British nationals, 86.6 per
cent were born in the UK and 80.5 per cent are White British. One might think
that this shows that the proportion of foreigners – however defined – remains
low across the population as a whole. Moreover, some
have argued that the police’s joint operation with the UKBA shows that the
number of illegal immigrants in the UK is far lower than previously thought.
This would suggest that the level of concern and the efforts put into the
detention and removal of immigrants are disproportionate.

There are some areas where the Census figures are more
striking. In London, only 44.9 per cent of the population is white British. In the
London Borough of Newham, only 16.7 per cent is white British. However, only
foreign nationals can be detained and removed under immigration powers. In
terms of nationality rather than ethnicity, London is far closer to the
national average: 71.2 per cent are British nationals. So to the extent that it
is figures on ethnicity in places like London that are causing the political
impulse to detain and remove, logically these measures are inappropriate:
detention and removal cannot address the perceived 'problem' of ethnicity.

So it seems that behind the apparently straightforward
legal grounds for the tap on the shoulder, the grounds for the political
decisions are not so straightforward.

Yet perhaps the figures can provide us with some
guidance on this matter also. Plainly there are more foreigners in the UK now
than there have been in the past: for example, since the last census in 2001
the foreign born population has increased from approximately 9 per cent to 13
per cent and the foreign ethnicity population has increased from 12 per cent to
19 per cent.

In broadly the same period, approximately 1.7 million
foreign nationals became British citizens and so obtained the right to
contribute to political decision making through the vote. It follows that the
citizens that the Government represents contains increasing numbers of people
of foreign origin. As such, on this basic level the immigrant subject to the
tap on the shoulder must be a relatively familiar figure to the Government that
pursues them – they must to this extent remind the Government of itself.

Given the increasing numbers of former foreign
nationals that the Government represents, one might expect that its policies
towards foreigners would become more sympathetic. It seems intuitively correct
that people of immigrant origin are more likely to be in favour of immigration
and some recent statistics
support this. The Government’s policies, particularly its emphasis on detention
and removal, are instead increasingly unsympathetic.

It therefore appears that the Government is
representing the views of the steadily decreasing proportion of citizens not of
foreign origin. Some
of these people in turn themselves feel increasingly foreign due to the growing
numbers of people in the UK who are of foreign origin, whether among the
citizenry or not.

It follows that the Government represents two groups
of foreigners. First, those that are literally of foreign origin and second,
those that metaphorically feel themselves to be foreign. The tap on the
shoulder therefore reveals a disconcertingly familiar face. As the foreigner
turns around, the Government finds itself looking in the mirror.

The apparently disproportionate and illogical
political focus on detention and removal becomes a little more clear. A Government
increasingly aware of its internally foreign character pursues ever greater
numbers of external foreigners. This internal battle helps to account for the
excessive character of the Government’s external conflict.

Some may say that this is unsurprising: it is
precisely the disconcerting familiarity of the encounter with the foreigner
that requires us to re-assert order by strengthening our borders and
re-establishing the distinction between natives and foreigners.

Yet, I suggest, this revealing encounter is wasted if
it leads us simply to recoil in horror. Before restoring the status quo, the
metaphorically foreign have the opportunity to pause and consider whether being
foreign need be such an unpleasant experience. They may even choose to listen
to the voices of the literally foreign fellow members of the citizenry on this
matter. This would allow the reconstruction of the citizenry as an alliance of
foreigners.

Of course, borders would continue to have a role to
play in this. Without metaphorical borders, there would be no distinction
between the different members of the citizenry and therefore no basis on which
to enjoy the experience of being foreign. But perhaps a different approach to
these borders would lead also to a more nuanced approach to the literal borders
of the State – one not quite so fixated on detention and removal.

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